Posts tagged Makes

Strata+Hadoop World, Big Data’s big conference last week, was filled with sessions dedicated to the gospel of bigness: More data equals more good. From data lakes to enterprise data hubs, the industry has made a fetish of gathering ever more data.

Because, you know, insights are bound to occur. In a twist on open source’s “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” Big Data proclaims, “Given enough data, all data will sprout correlations and consequent insights.”

Except, of course, that it doesn’t.

As much as we want to fetishize data volumes, the reality is that data is only as useful as the people interpreting it. Yes, machines can programmatically act on correlations they “see” in large data sets, but truly revolutionary change may start with Big Data but ends with Big Insights from real people.

Signal, Meet Noise

Even T.S. Eliot, one of the great poets of the twentieth century, knew this. Writing in 1935, Eliot bemoans the insight we’ve lost in spite of a wealth of data:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

At least some of the struggles we have with Big Data arise from not knowing what to do with all the data we now accumulate. This shows through in a Gartner survey:

If the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of useful information almost certainly isn’t. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine–but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.

Real insight begins when people apply domain expertise to a body of data to intelligently query that data. As Silver continues, “The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.” Hence, while we can introduce biases into the data, we also can attain perspicacity.

Visualizing Data

To enable individuals to make sense of the ever-increasing mountains of corporate data, companies like Tableau, Roambi, Zoomdata, and other next-generation business intelligence vendors have arisen. These companies make it easier for the rank-and-file within an enterprise to understand data.

to provide a beautiful, simple, yet powerful interface and underlying tech stack to allow regular business people to access, visualize, and collaborate around data that is residing and streaming into a variety of big data backends, and do that efficiently at large data and user scale.

Or as Roambi recently noted in a blog post, “As you invest in big data and analytics solutions, make sure you invest just as much into the people who will use them.”

As the company explains, “It’s up to the business to invest in training end-users how to think about and use data and analytics as much as they invest in the actual infrastructure and product.” In other words, downloading Hadoop isn’t the answer. Not the final answer, anyway.

Which may be another way of saying that companies need to prioritize their people, not their data. As Roambi coaches, data-before-people is increasingly the norm, and it causes several, related problems:

Analysts aren’t sure which metrics to provide: They may know how to pick apart data to discover insights, but don’t know how to communicate these through dashboards that tell a story to a particular job function

Metrics aren’t being segregated based off job roles: Different roles require different data

End-users can’t transform information into knowledge: People need training to learn how to think about data effectively

Businesses are collecting data without changing behaviors: Organizations should change in response to the data

The foundation for resolving these issues is to better visualize data for mere mortals. Small wonder, then, that Tableau, the market leader, has seen its stock hit all-time highs recently.

By all means, keep investing in Hadoop, NoSQL databases, and other Big Data infrastructure. Just don’t forget to also invest in the data visualization software that will help to make it meaningful for your employees who will ultimately be the ones to make sense of your data.

Social software company Shareaholic argues that the shift from search to social is here with the release of a new set of data that reveals social media referral traffic is up 22.71% from this time last year. In total, in December 2014 top 8 social networks drove 31.24% of overall traffic to web sites. These networks include Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Shareaholic’s Q4 Social Media Traffic Report, released today, includes a year-over-year as well as a 3-year trend analysis. The report is full of of stats that illustrate social media’s role as a traffic driver over […]

Jayson Demers, Founder of Audience Bloom, is the featured guest on Marketing Nerds this week. Jayson is a well-writer for Search Engine Journal, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., and many other outlets. Jayson regularly tweaks his content based on what he’s found gets the most exposure, and he’s sharing some of his insight with us today. In this episode of Marketing Nerds, we cover: An overview of writing a lot of content for exposure What types of titles get the most traffic How to share your posts, including specific online niches that may work for you Types of content that regularly get the most traffic […]

Jayson Demers, Founder of Audience Bloom, is our featured guest on Marketing Nerds this week. Jayson is a well-writer for Search Engine Journal, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., and many other outlets. Jayson regularly tweaks his content based on what he’s found gets the most exposure, and he’s sharing some of his insight with us today. In this episode of Marketing Nerds, John and Jayson cover: An overview of writing a lot of content for exposure What types of titles get the most traffic How to share your posts, including specific online niches that may work for you Types of content that regularly get […]

Uber is offering an olive branch to the city governments it’s often clashed with by sharing some of its transportation data to help with traffic planning. Boston will be first in line, the company said Tuesday.

The crowdsourced taxi service said it will provide anonymized data about Uber ride dates, times, and trip durations. This will ideally help the city ease traffic congestion by pinpointing peak locations and hours for travel.

This marks the first time Uber has opened up its data trove to anyone, but it could be argued that the company is returning a favor. This month, Massachusetts formally recognized ride-sharing services as an official mode of transportation in the state.

Furthermore, if Uber becomes a powerful tool in city government officials’ pockets, it can better make a case for its legitimacy and usefulness nationwide.

Next up is New York City, where Uber is currently in talks for another data sharing program, Justin Kintz, head of policy for North America, told the Wall Street Journal.

Two popular features that Reddit Gold users enjoy will now be available to all users, VentureBeat reports. All Reddit users will now receive a notification when their account is linked to by another Reddit user, like when they’re mentioned in a thread or a post. Another feature being rolled out to all users is the ability to send anonymous replies when gifted Reddit Gold by another user. Reddit Gold is how Reddit monetizes itself — giving users the ability to pay a small fee ($4/month) to have access exclusive features, some of which eventually get rolled out to all users. […]